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Sales and Marketing

01/20/2014

In this five minute video, Seth Godin shares the latest busines trend. On one hand, the time gap between need and satisfaction is shrinking, on the other hand the market has become more tribal. The consequences of this trend are:

1. To become the top choice in the real time market, we need years of preparation

2. To capture the real time expectations of our customers we need real time technology tools (real time analytics)

3. To insure relevancy in real time we need to subscribe to the right connections.

01/16/2014

"You have everything you need to build something bigger than yourself," is one of my favorite Seth Godin quotes. A short conversation with him will leave you thinking for days afterwards. Seth thinks deeper and his ideas grow in an unusual soil. His mind operates on Olympic levels of curiosity. It’s no wonder that over 1 million people read his blog. He has authored 17 books and many of them have made it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. If you don't know Seth, it's not to late to join him online, join his (Sethsblog.com) and enjoy his kaleidoscopic perspective. Here is just one fragment from a blog post Oct. 29, 2012 “Who you hang out with determines what you dream about and what you collide with. And the collisions and the dreams lead to your changes.”

Seth and I agreed to meet for lunch in New York City. As I approached the restaurant, I noticed him standing outside, wearing a stylish suit and tie, a blue bike helmet dangling from his left hand while he looked at his cell phone. Seth is always in pursuit of quality, efficiency while enjoying life. "I am searching for a better place to eat," he explained. He took the train from his office in Hastings on the Hudson to New York City and pedaled over on a city bike. We decided to walk in the direction of our studio and after a few steps we found an oyster bar. We ordered a plate of 8 delicious oysters to share, which inspired Seth to share this thought: "Four is just enough. It's interesting that in our culture we tend to think that more is better. It isn't. Four oysters are delicious and six are OK, but the more you eat the more the initial pleasure wears off. Research shows that more health care for seniors doesn’t make them healthier, and a greater reduction of teacher-to-student ratios in schools doesn’t lead to better grades. If the class size gets too small, grades go down again." Seth’s point, that more is not better, runs against the “supersize-it” neurotic, greed-is-good culture that characterizes the superficial mindset of America’s underbelly.

Seth’s antenna is always tuned into to the emerging Zeitgeist of our times. In this six-minute video interview he explains the major shifts in business and how we should approach 2014. His well articulated insight – if applied –is enough to optimize your success in 2014.

01/15/2014

Today’s post is by Mike Pugh, vice president of marketing at j2 Global Inc.

You’re probably often on the lookout for new tools and technology to help you drive more business. As a marketing executive with a company that provides cloud-based communication tools to millions of customers, I regularly receive feedback from professionals about what actually adds value for them. I’m amazed at how often the tools and techniques that make the biggest difference are easy to implement, inexpensive, or even free.

This principle holds true for sales, as well: you can realize big gains in your business with very small technological changes. In fact, by adding just a few simple mobile apps and making a couple of minor adjustments in your digital routine, you can improve every stage of your sales process – and close more deals.

1. Improve the Meet: Business Card Reader App

You’ve just met a potentially valuable prospect, who hands you a business card. This person’s name is hard to pronounce and remember, so you’ll hang on to the card. Do you have a foolproof process for getting the card’s details into your contact-management system?

Here’s where a digital card reader can make all the difference. For a few dollars, you can install a brilliant app on your smartphone, snap a picture of any business card, and the details will automatically populate in your phone’s contact list.

Rather than wait until you’re at your computer to manually enter your prospect’s details, you can do it with one click, from anywhere. In fact, as soon as your prospect walks away, you can click his or her contact information into your phone and send a thank-you message.

After you’ve begun conversing with your new prospect, you’ll probably use several digital methods to communicate – email, certainly, but also perhaps Skype, LinkedIn, text messaging, and any number of social-media tools. Do you know how you appear visually on all of these digital platforms?

You might not realize it, but if you’re sending a prospect an informal email using your Gmail account, Google Chat, or Google+, your photo might appear as part of your message. Is it a professional image or a photo of you in a t-shirt holding your cat? Invest in a professional head shot, one that is consistent with the image you want to convey to prospects, customers, and colleagues, and add this picture to every digital platform you use. You’ll be investing in your own personal brand.

3. Improve Your Responsiveness When It Counts: Voicemail to Text

Now assume you’re well down the sales path with your prospect. You’re at a convention, engaged in another potentially important chat with a prospect, when your phone buzzes. You glance down. The caller is The Prospect Whose Name Is Hard to Pronounce. You don’t want to interrupt your face-to-face conversation to answer, but how long should you wait to listen to the voicemail? What if it’s important? What if this is the call?

A virtual phone solution from eVoice® transcribes your voicemail in real time and sends you the message as text. Glance down at your phone once more and see that the prospect wanted only a reminder about a small detail of your offering. This wasn’t the call. You can respond later.

4. Improve the Close Itself: Sign Digitally from Anywhere

OK, NOW you get the call. Your prospect is sold and is faxing you a signed copy of the agreement to review and countersign. But it’s day two at the convention; you’re still there, and you’re busy. Still, you don’t want too much time to pass, or your prospect might wonder if there’s a problem. What to do?

With an online fax service such as eFax®, you can receive, review, edit, digitally sign, and return the fax right from your smartphone. Sign your name on the phone’s screen using just your finger, save the document, then fax it back via email. Deal done.

These are just a few ideas to get your creative gears turning, and I encourage you to seek out other easy-to-use tools to build into your sales process. Remember, small changes can have a big impact on your bottom line.

01/14/2014

While science fiction writers lead us into a world we'll never see in our lifetime, historians remind us of a world that existed before we were born. Technology however leads us into a far more interesting space: real time.

Here are just a few examples to illustrate that point. When we are hungry, we go to Yelp and find a restaurant in real time. When we see a breaking news event, we go to Twitter to learn what's happening in real time from citizen journalists. Banks are implementing technology that allows people to manage their money in real time. Big Data technology allows real time analysis and pattern recognition that leads to faster and better decisions. Online technology shows us what our customers are doing on our website in real time. For example, Hubspot's new sales tool Signals tells us when an email has been opened by the recipient in real time. A great opportunity to connect with a prospect instantly.

Real time analysis is not only used for business, but in many other fields. For example, this month, the State of Nevada installed special sensors in snow plows that deliver information to a data center that combines real-time street information with data from radar and computer weather models to get a real time look of present and emerging winter road conditions.

A company called 94Fifty created a basketball with special sensors that gives the player instant feedback for every pass or shot, tracking ball speed, shooting angle and ball rotation. Real time feedback does wonders for improving performance.

To tell us how Marketing in Sales is moving into the real time space, check out this five-minute video interview with David Meerman Scott, the author of Real Time Marketing and PR.

You can connect with David, our keynote speaker, at our next Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco on May 5-6 and shake hands with him in real time.

01/13/2014

In the January issue of Selling Power magazine in the Cloud we published a cover story with Seth Godin. To enhance the experience with our content we now add video interviews that I think you will find very helpful.

In this short video (3:44 min) Seth explains why saying no to client builds trust and why accepting a no from a client can help you build a stronger relationship.

12/27/2013

Lead qualification used to center around BANT (budget, authority, need, and time). This was easy for salespeople and sales managers to understand. Did the client have the budget? Were you dealing with someone who had the authority to bind your organization to a deal? Did the prospect need what you were selling? Was there a deadline by which the prospect would need to make a purchase?

Selling has changed dramatically since BANT, and lead qualification needs to change in an equally dramatic fashion.

The following two statements are very different: Your clients do not have the budget for what you’re selling. They don’t have a budget, but they do have the money. Unless you can tie what you sell to one of your prospect’s major initiatives, you’re going to have a tough time getting your prospect to part with any money. Even if prospects may not have a budget, they may still be qualified.

Let’s deal with the authority issue: more decisions are now made by consensus. There is no longer a power sponsor; there are power sponsors. There is no longer an economic buyer; there are economic buyers. There is no longer an authority; the person with the ability to bind your client organization to a deal will likely look to his or her team to advise as to whether or not to proceed. The question now isn’t whether someone has authority, it’s whether or not a person can build consensus.

The most pernicious problem today for sales reps is that their prospective clients don’t believe there’s a need. These prospects have latent dissatisfaction. They have problems, challenges, and opportunities that they have not yet recognized, and they won’t likely recognize those needs without the help of a salesperson with the business acumen and situational knowledge to help them understand that better results are available to them. If you disqualify every lead for not being able to state a need, you’re going to have a very empty pipeline. The question isn’t whether or not your prospects have a need they can express, but whether or not you have the ability to help them recognize a new need that’s worth a war with the status quo.

As for the issue of time, if your prospective clients don’t have a stated need, they don’t have the time constraint. This is also a challenge for salespeople as they qualify leads. Can you build a case for something differentiated and compelling enough to help them commit to a time? For clients, the more compelling the opportunity, the more money that’s being left on the table by not acting, the more opportunities they miss, the greater your ability to lock in a date. You need the ability to be compelling.

So what does this mean for lead qualification? If not BANT, what then?

Does your prospective client have a challenge around which you can create massive value? If so, then he or she will find the budget.

Do you have a sponsor who will introduce you to all the other sponsors and help you build consensus within the organization? You’re not looking for authority; you’re looking for someone with deep influence in the organization. You’re looking for someone who will help you with access.

Finally, consider engagement. Don’t mistake engagement for receptivity – receptivity alone is not enough. Look for a group of stakeholders who feel so strongly about improving results that they will help you build the case for change – a group that will go to war with the status quo.

12/19/2013

Effective qualification, as an integral part of the sales process, is a supremely valuable tool not just for the sales organization but for the company overall. Remember, there are really only two reasons why you lose a sale: 1) you shouldn’t be there in the first place, i.e., this is a deal you should not win, or 2) you were outsold. If marketing and sales are aligned when outlining the profile of the ideal target customer, then a lot of the pain associated with the first reason goes away. You’ve targeted the customer correctly; so, yes, if there is an opportunity, the salesperson should have a good chance of winning it, unless he or she is outsold by a competitor. But winning the sale is not about just identifying the right customer profile. We also need to understand whether there is really an opportunity to win. (This is one of the four key questions that are part of TAS from The TAS Group.)

Unless you have a crystal ball, you cannot forecast accurately if you don’t qualify properly. Poor qualification leads to missed numbers and surprise sales losses. If internal resources are allocated based on your pipeline, your credibility is seriously damaged, and your customers will slip down the priority list when internal resources are allocated. Then neither sales nor marketing knows where to spend time.

Link precise qualification with your sales-process stages and pipeline management, and then you know what’s going on. (If you need to create a new sales process, or optimize the one you currently use, you can create a customized sales process for free at Dealmaker Genius.)

Depending on the questions you ask and the information you glean, you can determine how likely the sale is to close. Consider the following list of questions. Depending on how you structure the interaction between sales and marketing, whether you use inside sales or telemarketing, and how you define a qualified lead or opportunity will all help you determine whether these questions should be asked by marketing or sales.

Does the customer have an identified project?

Is budget allocated?

Do you know the compelling event that will motivate the customer to buy?

Are all of the influencers identified?

What roles do those influencers play?

Have you won this type of business before?

Can you win this one?

What’s your source of information?

Are there any competing projects?

Is there a date by which this project has to be completed?

Is this a competitive opportunity, and what is your competitive advantage?

Do you fully understand the buyer’s needs?

Can you meet those needs competitively?

Does it matter if the project slips a few months? (If so, you might question whether it is worth the time now.)

What’s the downside for the company if it doesn’t proceed with the purchase of a product such as yours?

Qualification is not an event. It’s an ongoing process. As buyers evaluate you, you must continue to qualify them. If you are a value creator during the evaluation, you’ve earned the right to probe deeper into the opportunity. The qualification process involves establishing the rules of engagement and laying the groundwork for control of the sales process. You must make sure that you question for objective and accurate answers. Ask the same question of different influencers in the account, and you will be surprised at what you learn about the perspective of each role. You need to be sure that you’re working on a real opportunity.

One of the main benefits of disciplined qualification is a pipeline that’s credible and a forecast you can stand over and deliver, and this is where sales and marketing need to be totally aligned.

When does a target become a qualified prospect that warrants extensive sales effort? Marketing can put in place a rigorous lead- or opportunity-qualification process, agreed with sales, so that the salesperson is truly motivated to quickly pursue targets that marketing identifies.

How many qualified prospects do you need at each stage of the pipeline to meet your quota? When you know sales quota and the rate at which deals progress through the funnel, examining the current value of each stage in the funnel can provide indicators of when a shortfall exists.

What is the specific evidence you need to determine whether a deal is likely to close? Marketing and sales need to work together on the verifiable outcomes in each stage of the sales process, and marketing must consider what sales tools are required to help the sales team achieve those outcomes.

As you are getting to that final negotiation stage, what’s the impact of poor qualification on your ability to strike a good deal? What sales and marketing effort do you need to make to ensure that risk is minimized at this stage of the deal?Qualification is a shared function between sales and marketing, and that recognition tends to focus the activities that marketing undertakes beyond just throwing a lead over the fence.

12/12/2013

Salespeople do not want to spend valuable time weeding through questionable leads or following up with prospects who will never convert. How can you reduce the grunt work needed to qualify leads without risking pipeline opportunities? And wouldn’t it be nice if your best leads magically bubbled to the top?

There’s a new crystal ball that forward-thinking sales teams are using to accelerate the process of finding qualified leads. It’s called predictive lead scoring, and it helps sales managers figure out where to focus the team’s energy so that the best reps are pursuing only the best opportunities. If good reps can typically work 100 leads in a month, predictive lead scoring can help ensure that every prospect they call is a good fit for your product.

What Is Predictive Scoring?

Imagine having a search box where you could enter an email address, and it returns an accurate prediction of whether or not that person’s company is likely to buy your product. That's what predictive lead scoring is all about. It works like this:

First, it looks at historical information from your sales and marketing applications (data on, for example, converted leads, wins and losses, account profiles, and purchase history) to understand what a good customer really looks like.

Next, it adds to any information you already have about your new leads (inside Salesforce or any other system), by grabbing from the Web valuable data points about the individual and the organization for which he or she works, e.g., relevant job postings, employee count, patent filings, social presence, Website traffic, and even the company’s preferred technology vendors.

Then it uses sophisticated techniques such as data mining, statistical modeling, and machine learning to make sense of all this information about prospective buyers and assigns each lead a score that indicates likelihood of converting.

Rather than just rely on human intuition to weigh hundreds of variables, predictive scoring automatically creates the optimal model for your product and continuously returns accurate predictions to your CRM system in a format that’s easy for anyone to interpret, not just data scientists or IT people.

Keep Up with Your Data-Driven Competitors

The value that predictive scoring brings to your top line is mind-blowing. You can gain major lifts in win rates and lead conversions by predicting outcomes, prioritizing your flow of leads, and focusing on your best prospects. It lets you put your resources where you’ve got the best shot at winning and eliminate wasted energy at each stage in the sales funnel.

What percentage of your time is currently spent on prospects who don’t convert? Fifty percent, maybe more? And on the flip side, how often do you give up on a prospect one touch too soon? Whether you’re selling to existing customers, prospects, or a totally new market, predictive scoring will uncover opportunities you may never have seen otherwise.

One of the coolest things about this method is that folks like us at Infer can use it bring the power of predictive data science (think Google PageRank or Amazon recommendations) to all companies, so anyone can operate with the same data-driven intelligence as Google, Facebook, or Amazon. Instead of looking in the rearview mirror and waiting to see which leads convert, with predictive scoring, you can place the right bets and get to qualified prospects faster than your competition.

11/21/2013

If your company hasn’t been making its numbers and your employees seem disengaged, it’s time to examine how to incent them uniquely and appropriately.

A big part of building a successful sales team is building a comp plan to suit your team members’ individual needs. Let’s look at the specialized roles that round out your team and how to optimally incent your team members.

1) Hunters

A hunter is your “traditional” salesperson; he or she probably cold-called you to get the job and followed up persistently. Hunters are bold and thrive in the field, where they can hunt new business. Their main task is to nurture leads and close deals. To incent hunters properly, make sure that a large portion of their target salary comes from variable pay. Among Xactly users (more than 500 emerging to enterprise companies) the average hunter pay mix is 50 percent fixed and 50 percent variable.

A recent PR Newswire article, “Motivating Your Sales Force: Do Bonuses or Commissions Work Better?” cited an AMA study that compared bonus-at-target plans to commission-beyond-target plans and found that “sales improved by 24% when the sales reps were switched to the commissions scheme.” Why? The key to optimally incenting hunters is to break down any barriers to performance. A common barrier that companies set up for hunters is a capped commission plan. The organization may believe it’s protecting the budget, but the reward isn’t worth taking away the motivation for hunters to knock it out of the park.

2) Farmers

While hunters stay hot on the trail of new business, farmers harvest deals by nurturing existing clients, keeping customers happy, and cross-selling. You’re guaranteed a lower churn rate when you have talented farmers focused on consulting and renewals. To reward farmers properly, you want to motivate them to up-sell – without taking advantage of the customer with unnecessary up-selling. This can be tricky. With the optimal pay mix, you can avoid both overeager farmers trying to sell nonessential products and complacent farmers so satisfied with the annuity stream from their patch that they forget about growth. Farmers’ incentive compensation plan should have a 60/40 mix of growth and annuity reward.

3) Prospectors

Without consistent leads streaming through your pipeline, deals (and therefore cash flow) are sapped. This leaves reps vulnerable to falling short of quota. The prospector’s job is to ensure a plethora of qualified leads so that hunters can focus on doing what they do best – closing deals. To inspire the best performance from your prospectors, you need a plan that incents them to always find new leads. You don’t want to pay for just leads; that’s a prospector trap. You want to pay for closed business. Construct your plan to reflect this need with a healthy 60/40 mix between leads and revenue. Worried certain prospectors will score a few high-revenue deals and put their feet up for the rest of the quarter? Add a control, or threshold, on credit for big deals.

4) Specialists

This sales-support role is absolutely critical. You don’t want a rep getting tongue-tied because the demo and sale are too complex. Back your reps with specialists to help answer industry-specific questions and address technical challenges. When it comes to incenting the role that some have referred to as the “brains” of the team, pay should be primarily base. Specialists need to provide the best advice possible to the rep and the customer. To fulfill their purpose as the trusted advisors, they can’t have too much variable pay, or you won’t be motivating desired behavior, you’ll be turning your specialists into hunters. To incent the specialist, measure the quality of closed business, and compliment with a measure of the intrinsic value of a deal to the customer.

5) Captains

Depending on the size of your organization, you’ll need multiple captains to keep the team aligned and working toward company objectives. Just as all football teams need a coach, every sales force needs a captain. This person’s tasked with looking at the team holistically, discovering outlier reps, and keeping them focused on the deals and goals that matter most. When it comes to compensating captains, their quota should be less than the sum of all their reps’ quotas combined. Adjust your captains’ quotas for new hires and open slots; you don’t want a captain to be so fearful about not making quota that he or she will keep poorly performing reps on the payroll or hire inept candidates just to fill a seat. With an opportunity-based quota for managers, you incent them to build their “A” team, not to just build a team.

Incent according to these personality types, and you’ll be ready to hit the ground running going into the next quarter.

Check out our featured guide, “Bring Your A-Game,” for a more detailed study of building your best sales team.

11/15/2013

Recently, over a cup of coffee, Dan Waldschmidt (Waldschmidt Partners) and I talked about the herd mentality that causes many well-intentioned businesspeople to follow the crowd blindly – often in the wrong direction – based on one so-called expert or another proclaiming that “cold calling is dead” or “content is king,” as though it were all that simple. Dan subsequently published a blog post called “Sometimes the experts are idiots. So just go be awesome.” Read the post, but here are some thoughts he shared.

He wrote about some dubious statements:

“In 1899, Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the US Office of Patents, astutely noted, ‘Everything that can be invented has been invented.’ Since then, 7,673,820 inventors have received patents from the USPTO.

“In 1943, Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, observed, ‘I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.’ As of June 2010, there were approximately 1,966,514,816 computers connected to the Internet – accounting for roughly 28% of the global population.

“In 2007, Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, proclaimed, ‘There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.’ Since 2007, Apple has sold almost 430 million iPhones. Microsoft has only sold about 2% of that number.”

Also in his blog post, Dan advised the following:

“You should keep dreaming big dreams. You should refuse to believe that things won’t change.

“What you feel doesn’t need facts yet. It just needs you to believe. To believe so passionately that you move past logic, criticism, and everything that you think is possible in the pursuit of making it reality.”

Dan also shared these ideas with me:

“My problem with the crowd mentality is that it lacks an authentic environment for replication. From weight loss to financing to working from home and business growth, experts will try to convince the crowd that the expert's plan is easily replicable. Even if the experts are sincere, they are sadly misguided.

“Regardless of the specifics, the crowd mentality focuses on what everyone else is doing, rather than what each specific member of the crowd should be doing. Adherence, rather than creativity, is rewarded, and that by itself is a pretty big problem.”

There was a time when “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” Today, it seems that nobody ever gets fired for abandoning outbound marketing in favor of inbound marketing. It’s now possible for marketing to pass a higher quantity of poorly qualified leads to sales faster than ever before. The result: sales mostly ignores the avalanche of poorly qualified leads that scored high enough (according to the marketing department) to be sent to sales as marketing-qualified leads. One marketing organization we work with passes thousands of leads to sales knowing that only 1.28 percent of what is sent is qualified. Honestly, people – this has got to stop!

There are three things that organizations can do to stop the insanity:

Sales must proactively accept or reject marketing leads within 48 hours of receipt. If rejected, a judicial branch made up of senior marketing and sales executives, along with a C-level executive (in larger companies), should determine if the lead did not meet the agreed-upon lead criteria or if sales follow-up was insufficient and/or ineffective. This will reduce lead leakage by not allowing a lead to go into a black hole. Neither marketing nor sales can maintain the status quo. Statistically backed accountability will drive continuous improvement.

Once a lead is accepted by sales, a realistic close rate should be agreed upon and worked toward (including eventually working toward improving that rate). Ask reps today what percentage of qualified leads they can close, and they will tell you 60–80 percent. What they are really saying is that they will close 60–80 percent of the leads they thought they were going to close. According to some industry analysts, average companies close about 20 percent of sales-qualified leads, while best-in-class sales organizations close closer to 30 percent. No sales rep wants to take credit for losing four out of five times, so organizations do not have visibility into lead status unless the lead is close to being won or it is too late to do anything about it. Sales reps will sell more when they are focused on fewer opportunities but held accountable for the process their company has put in place for lead pipeline and forecast movement. Without step 1, step 2 is impossible.

Kill the insane preoccupation with the lead-definition “god” called BANT (budget, authority, need, time frame). In The New Solution Selling by Keith Eades, there are two important “truths”:

“The not-looking buyer has great potential.

“When the salesperson sells into latent pain, that salesperson has an excellent opportunity to set or define the buyer’s buying requirements.”

Yet most companies’ sales reps are uninterested in leads unless they are BANT qualified. Unless you are selling an inexpensive solution or a commodity, you are too late to the game when you wait for a lead to be BANT qualified. But here is what “general-interest lead” means to different audiences:

AVERAGE SALES REP: “No budget, no timeframe, no interest in working it. I would rather take someone who is nice to me to lunch, rather than work strategically on a sale.”

ELIGHTENED SALES REP: “Authority [decision maker or coach influencer] and need or pain [backed by some form of compelling event] – I’m on it! I know that I have a better chance of closing a strategic deal when I’m in early. Let my lazy brethren fight for the crumbs.”

Break away from the crowd! The next time you hear someone say, “Seventy percent of the buying process is complete before sales needs to get involved,” respectfully but forcefully disagree. Do something different, because following the crowd is not going to work. As Dan says at the end of his blog post, “No one can stop you if you won’t be stopped. Choose to be awesome.”